DVD ISO files with My TVSeries Plugin (1 Viewer)

[pirivan]

We wouldn't be "enthusiasts" if we didn't try to tweak everything all the time to make our setups better. So I changed the way I organize my TVseries from DVD.

I found the program called MakeMKV. It basically rips a dvd and wraps it in a .mkv container, without reencoding. This is cool, because it means that I don't have to have individual folders for each episode. In MakeMKV I get a list of all the titles on a disc. There is an option to ignore titles that are less than x number of seconds, so you only get the actual episodes (and not menues, trailers and stuff). You also have the option to select which audio and subtitle tracks that you wan't to rip. You can rip all the titles on a disc in one go.


All in all the program does everything I ever used DVDshrink for + puts the episodes in seperate .mkv containers. And the best thing is that is freeware.
I use it for ripping my DVD movies as well.

I just finished doing something very similar for a TV Series I had in ISO format. As it turns out, it is INCREDIBLY hard to find applications that you can use to do a direct stream copy from a DVD. What I ended up doing was this.

1. Mount the ISO with Daemon Tools Lite
2. "Re-Author" the disc with DVD Shrink to ONLY include the primary actual episode video files, audio tracks and subtitles and tell DVD Shrink to NOT do any compression. I set it to re-author to a folder on the hard drive (gives you a bunch of vob's). I know that this can be done with MakeMKV as well but I didn't learn that until I was almost finished anyhow
3. Point MakeMKV to the .ifo file and press "make MKV" and it converted it nicely to an mkv file without any compression; easy

Unfortunately in this particular case, the each DVD had 3 episodes all contained in one file, so I had to watch the file for the episode breaks, note the times they occurred and use time-codes to split the large MKV file that contained 4 episodes into separate, individual episodes using MKVMerge. I also didn't like the subtitles from the DVD so I muxed in subtitles from another source (again using MKVMerge) and had to add some slight delay to the subtitles to get them to match (using MKVMerge).

I absolutely love MakeMKV because it's SIMPLE and allows you to easily convert a DVD into a nice MKV file without any encoding/loss in quality/time spent encoding. I've tried encoding over the years with many different applications and have NEVER been happy with the quality/size files I would generate; lossless is the way to go for all my rips from now on.

The only issue with MakeMKV is that it's beta and doesn't work properly with all DVD's (you can read about this on their forums). And in fact it errors out without any specific reason why when trying to convert one of DVD's I had re-authored with DVD Shrink. Still though, it was free, so I don't have much to complain about. It worked perfectly for the aforementioned TV Series.

 

[Cruzer]

It seems to me that you gain nothing by making a mkv and not re-encoding. I converted all my TV series into individual mkv files and re-encoded them to h264. They are a fraction of the original size and look the same to me. We're talking a huge saving in disk space if you have a large collection. I use MeGUI. Once you have split the DVD into individual episodes, it only takes a few minutes to queue up an entire season to re-encode. Of course, it takes a while to process, even on my 3.5GHz quad core. But for me, I don't care. The space savings is way worthwhile.

 

[jonaskp]

It seems to me that you gain nothing by making a mkv and not re-encoding. I converted all my TV series into individual mkv files and re-encoded them to h264. They are a fraction of the original size and look the same to me. We're talking a huge saving in disk space if you have a large collection. I use MeGUI. Once you have split the DVD into individual episodes, it only takes a few minutes to queue up an entire season to re-encode. Of course, it takes a while to process, even on my 3.5GHz quad core. But for me, I don't care. The space savings is way worthwhile.

That can be true. The problem for me is, that I would KNOW that they are not the best quality. I may not be able to actually see it, but just knowing it, would bug me. I know, it's pedantic, I can't help it.
I might consider doing it with old series like Friends and Sex and the City where the quality is not too good anyway.

The thing I like about ripping and storing my media lossless is that at any time later on I can do whatever I will with them, without loosing quality. Say I wanna burn a copy to DVD. I can do this without loss of quality because there is no reencoding taking place anywere. Had I first encoded it to h264 I would have to re-encode it back in order to burn it.

I might not ever do that at all, but again, I like to know that I have the option. Same reason I rip all my musik in lossless. Currently I don't have audio equipment where I can hear the difference, but I know that I only have to rip it once and I'm set, no matter what system I end up with later and what formats I want to play.

I don't consider disc space to be a big problem today. Big drives has become relatively cheap, so I'd rather spend a little more on disc space, than sacrificing quality.

The great thing though, is that there are so many possibities that no matter what your preferences are, one of them are bound to suit you. Whether you want to reencode or keep the original lossless quality, they have all been covered here.

 

[Cruzer]

I hear what you're saying. I tend to feel the same way, but not with TV shows. I don't re-encode my movies yet, I just rip the ISO (stripping out all the unnecessary stuff). But for TV shows, I do re-encode. First of all, the production value and original quality just isn't that high. And like I said, I don't see any difference anyhow. So I figure with TV shows, the disk space savings are huge and make it worthwhile. Did I mention, I have alot of TV shows! I can always go back to the original DVDs if I need to do anything else (if I can find the box they are stashed in).

 

[eriksdam]

Jonas: Tak for tippet med makeMKV!! så kan jeg få rippet Matador (og en masse andet) nemt og uden kvalitets-kompromisser. Årets julegave

Thanks for the MakeMKV tip - works like a charm so far. I agree on the quality issues; lossless, or as close as you can get, is the way to go. Once you've degraded quality, there really isn't any way back.

 

[RoChess]

MKV is just a container for videos (MKA is for audio), and so you can pretty much just remux the VOB container video (MPEG-2 for DVD) and audio streams (usually AC3 or DTS), which will go as fast as your harddisk can copy a file.

You can even construct a single MKV file that contains multiple streams, including support for menus, chapters, and multiple bitmap/textual subtitles.

 

[Shangostar]

Im sure it would be possible for MPtvseries to retrieve info for multiple episodes in an iso depending on name.

i used to use something called Movieflow on my popcornhour and that would retrieve info for all the episodes. The iso file name had to be "Firefly S01E01E06" so it knew it had 6 eps in that iso and would get the info for ep 1 and 6 and all the eps in between.

I tried using the same file names for mp tvseries and it retrieves info for ep 1 and ep 6 but not the ones in between, i also tried naming the file "Firefly S01E01E02E03E04E05E06" and various other similar combination, in this case it retrieved info for ep 1 and ep 2. seems it is limited to finding info for only max two episodes.

 

[jonaskp]

Shangostar: That is correct. MPTVseries can currently only handle files that contains two episodes. Or, it can only parse two names. Don't know why really, but I never had any issues since I, as stated, rips my episodes to individual files.